Originally Posted by
joejack951
A wide range freewheel, chain slack, and cross-chaining are all independent issues. You can cross-chain a bike regardless of what gearing it has and with or without chain slack. You can get excessive chain slack on a bike regardless of gearing with or without cross-chaining. You use a wide range freewheel and not have issues with chain slack nor be forced to cross-chain.
With the correct rear derailler, it's difficult to put together a gearing set up that will still shift properly between chainrings and yet result in excessive chain slack. You'd need to swap chainrings and use the widest MTB cassette currently available. There are no off-the-shelf crankset/cassette combinations that would put you excessively outside of Shimano's conservative specs for their SGS rear deraillers. 53/39/30 with an 11/34 cassette is only 3 teeth beyond the 43 teeth for which they are spec'd.
You're totally missing the point that I was trying to make...
My point was not whether the gear combos WOULD work... my point was that manufacturers normally build bikes with gearing choices configured smack dab in the middle of the usable range. What I call "generic gearing". They won't build bikes with gearing out on the fringes of what's possible... mainly for two reasons. Because most new riders want "generic gearing" where every gear combination is ridable and because they have to build bikes that are idiot proof (hence making them basically lawsuit proof too).
To relate this to the OP... I was trying to say that if his bike was still in the stock configuration as it came from the factory, then chances are that the conservative setup of the factory gearing would make it unlikely that any of the gearing choices would cause much damage due to cross chaining.